AMD 2013 A & E-Series Kabini and Temash APUs

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Introduction, Specs, and Features

AMD has been pretty open about discussing certain products in the roadmap. In fact, we’ve disclosed a number of details regarding the main products we’ll be talking about in this article--Kabini, Temash, and Richland--over the last few months.

It was all the way back at CES that we first showed you Kabini, Temash, and Richland-based products in action in a number of prototype notebooks and tablets from Vizio, HP, Asus and others. And AMD actually talked about the foundation of two of these products (Kabini and Temash)—its Jaguar CPU core microarchitecture—at Hot Chips in April of last year. If you’re unfamiliar with Kabini and Temash, they are the codenames given to AMD’s next-gen, low-power APUs targeted at mobile and ultra-mobile form factors. Kabini and Temash are not simple updates to existing products, however. As we’ve mentioned, they feature newly-designed CPU cores fused to a Graphics Core Next-based GPU, and they're designed to considerably improve performance while also operating at lower power. Richland is based on last year’s Trinity microarchitecture, but it's updated with a number of power- and performance-related enhancements.

AMD Kabini SoC Die Shot

Above is a shot of a quad-core Kabini die. Kabini is the follow-up product to AMD’s very successful Brazos line of products. How successful was Brazos, you ask? According to the most recent information provided by AMD, the company sold upwards of 48 million units, and if you ask them, they’re expecting greater success from Kabini.

AMD Is Targeting Mobile Form Factors With Kabini, Temash, and Richland ULV

We’ll dive a little deeper on the pages ahead, but to give you some high-level guidance, Kabini is an x86 quad-core SoC (system on a chip) targeted at entry-level and small form factor touch notebooks. Officially, AMD will be referring to Kabini as their “2013 AMD Mainstream APU”, and it is one of these products that we’ve been able to test drive for the last couple of weeks.

A Kabini Based AMD A6-Series APU

Also arriving alongside Kabini is Temash. Temash and Kabini are based on the same microarchitecture and share essentially the same feature set, but Temash targets small form factor notebooks, tablets, and hybrids 13-inches and smaller. AMD puts Temash-based products under the “2013 AMD Elite Mobility APU” umbrella, and the SoCs will come in dual (A4) and quad-core (A6) configurations.